The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point.
Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river stream.
I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises.
Mahmoud Shabistaru, from "Time" in Rose Garden of Mystery.
*
Neither the symbolic detail
of a three instead of a two,
nor that rough metaphor
that hails one term dying and another emerging
nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process
muddle and undermine
the high plateau of this night
making us wait
for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause
is our murky pervasive suspicion
of the enigma of Time,
it is our awe at the miracle
that, though the chances are infinite
and though we are
drops in Heraclitus' river,
allows something in us to endure,
never moving.
*
Other poems for a new year.
*
Rolling the dice:
Egyptian stone die, ca. 30 B.C.—364 A.D., in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Iranian astrological plaque and dice, ca. 1600-1700, in the collection of Victoria & Albert Museum.
